During his closing monologue on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that while Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner is just discovering who he is, has a dicey past, and “doesn’t need a term in the Senate. He needs a gap year in Costa Rica”, “I would still urge the folks in Maine to vote for him, for two reasons: One, we need to restore balance in our government and a Democratic Senate would help a lot with that. And two, get used to it. America is a country filled with a lot of broken, horribly-educated, phone-addicted, sort of nutty people.”
Maher began by saying that Platner “has a backstory that screams, don’t ask. Now I don’t judge Graham Platner, because I’m just learning who he is. Problem is, so is he. What I do know is he served his country in the Marines, in war, and you can never discount how big that is. But then there’s the sexting while married, scary behavior so say some of his exes, old posts about how he’s a Communist and all cops are bastards and black people don’t tip.”
He added, “And then, of course, there’s the Nazi tattoo on his chest. Seriously, this guy’s whole life is the movie ‘The Hangover.’ He doesn’t need a term in the Senate. He needs a gap year in Costa Rica. And yet I would still urge the folks in Maine to vote for him, for two reasons: One, we need to restore balance in our government and a Democratic Senate would help a lot with that. And two, get used to it. America is a country filled with a lot of broken, horribly-educated, phone-addicted, sort of nutty people. And as long as we live in a representative democracy, we are always electing our reflection in the mirror.”
After talking about claims Platner talked about raping home invaders, Maher said war does things like that to people and “that’s who we created. Our society is not healthy. We create broken people.”
Maher further said, “Did Platner know the tattoo was a Nazi symbol when he got it? Maybe. But people today are so inundated with misinformation and Internet bullshit, I wouldn’t trust he knew what it stood for anyway.” And there is a new kind of voter, “people who are intensely political, but somehow know almost nothing about politics.”
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